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I have a child who underwent open heart surgery with general anesthesia when he was 2 1/2 months old. What I found was that his immune system was compromised because of the broad spectrum antibiotics that they gave him post surgery to avoid infection. My son may also have some cognitive impairment from the anesthesia. I can't say for sure, but I can say that I know anesthesia can and does affect the brain (plus my son's body temperature was taken very low in order to preserve his organs during the surgery).

My son doesn't seem to have the same amount of "common sense" or reasoning abilities that his 4 other siblings do and it wasn't until just now that I realized that the anesthetic he was under could have contributed to this. He was only about 10 pounds when he underwent surgery and had the general anesthesia which he was probably under for about an hour and a half (I have no idea how long he was under before they started working on him).

If I had had the choice to have him undergo the general anesthesia, heart/lung bi-pass machine, broad spectrum antibiotics and all the other drugs they gave him in the hospital, or to avoid them all, I'd have chosen to avoid every one of them simply because I know there's always risk associated when we take meds/vaccines, etc. But I obviously didn't have a choice. In order to save his life he had to be exposed to those things. And I believe they affected him to some degree.

It's good to hear that I have someone with the same case as son is. You know sometimes, it's hard to explain to people every time what my son's story is. It's nice to have this conversation with people who can really understand me.